A Fanfiction About Fanfiction
by JustGoogleIt
Summary: So, we've all read the stories of OCs accidentally meeting their YouTube idols, slopping Starbucks on themselves, pouring out their life stories, and eventually riding off into the sunset with the boy of their dreams. Now, don't get me wrong, I love a good OC/Starbucks-slop fic, but I thought I would take it from a different angle... (One-shot: Charlie McDonnell/OC/OC,... I guess.)


**A/N: Hello lovely Reader! **

**Welcome to my personal therapy session! You are welcome to listen in, but I completely understand if you'd rather move on to something a bit smuttier. This story sits somewhere between true fanfiction and regular fiction, as it is mainly about two original characters. If you choose to proceed, you'll soon see what I mean. I hope you enjoy the story! :) **

**~Bethany**

* * *

"Hey," I squeaked, handing him my CDs.

"Hey," Charlie McDonnell smiled back from behind his signing table, "and what's your name?"

It was a completely logical question to ask. That's what people do when they meet each other, after all. As I had been answering that question at least once every couple of weeks for the majority of the past seventeen years of my existence, I fancied myself somewhat of an expert on the subject of my personal nomenclature. Unfortunately, my brain and my mouth ceased cooperating with each other the moment that I got within two yards of the object of my awe.

"Um," I tried, my voice suddenly croaky and weird. Charlie looked up at me expectantly while I coughed.

"Let me guess... is it Olivia Caldwell?" he grinned.

"Yeah! How did you know?" I asked in amazement. Did freaking Charlie Mcdonnell watch my pathetic YouTube channel? Follow me on Tumblr? Twitter? Or-and the thought made me feel slightly ill-did he read my smutty fanfics about him?

He pointed at the conference pass hanging from my neck.

"Oh, right," I said, feeling like an idiot.

"So, is this your first VidCon?" he asked as he signed my CD case.

"Yeah." S_ay something interesting,_ I commanded myself. "I like your videos."

_Oh, real original, Olivia. That one will obviously stick in his memory forever. Great job._

"Thanks!" he said, handing me back my CD. "Well, I hope you have a great first conference!"

"You too!" I automatically returned, then internally face-palmed.

And then it was over. I walked away from the line of excited fans and began to put as much distance as possible between myself and any more famous people. I could feel that old familiar lump rising in my throat and every part of my being wanted to be anywhere but in that conference center. Upon reaching the opposite end of the room, I leaned my back against the wall, closed my eyes, and slid down until I was sitting on the floor, hugging my knees up to my chest.

Why did I have to be so pathetic? How long had I dreamed of the day that I would meet one of my YouTube idols? How many VidCons had I longed to attend before I had finally saved up the money? How many lectures had I given myself about how I would not just react like any other fangirl? And now that it was over, I saw myself for the pathetic creature that I was. I held my face in my hands and let the bitter tears fall.

After about ten minutes, I heard a small thump. I looked up to see a girl sitting cross-legged on the floor about four feet to my left. She looked close to my age; maybe a few years older.

"Do you want to talk about it?" she asked.

I blinked at her.

"I'm Sam," she offered.

"Olivia," I replied thickly, using my sleeve to wipe the tears from my cheek. Of course, I could recall the name _then_.

"Oh cool. I have a cousin named Olivia."

"Oh yeah?"

She laughed. "Well, probably. I have a hell of a lot of cousins. One of them is bound to be named Olivia."

I had to smile a bit at that.

"So, is the conference not everything you'd ever dreamed?" she asked innocently.

I sighed. "I guess not. I don't know. Maybe it's what I expected. The people are nice enough, it's just..." I trailed off, not entirely sure where I was going with the sentence.

"No, I get it," she said. "Are you here by yourself?"

"Yeah, none of my friends are really into YouTube."

"Same."

We sat there for a while, both leaning against the wall and gazing out into the busy room before us. Everywhere, people were talking, laughing, fan-girling, embracing, shrieking, filming, moving, running... it was a madhouse.

"Do you ever feel... pathetic?" I asked, still looking straight ahead. "When you meet them, I mean."

"Of course," Sam answered. "And all the rest of the time too. I think of how cool they all are for creating such awesome stuff and how pathetic I am by comparison. I mean, I'm twenty years old for goodness sake! I'm in college! They look like they're really making something with theirselves while I just upload stupid vlogs in which I rant about the perils of my personal life and internet-stalk a bunch of people who don't know me personally."

I nodded.

"But," she went on, "then I remember that they're just people too, and they probably feel the same way."

I scoffed, "Like that helps."

"It's true."

"Yeah, but..." I began.

Sam smiled. "I'll prove it. Look over there," she instructed, pointing to a skinny red-headed kid, probably around fourteen years old, who appeared to be filming a vlog twenty yards away. "Do you know who that guy is?"

I stared at him, attempting to place his acne-ridden face. "I have no idea," I admitted.

"His name is Seth. He lives in Utah, makes vlogs about himself and his eleven homeschooled siblings, and has about two-hundred subscribers, of which I am one. He's kind of hilarious, but his video equipment is total crap and he sort of sucks at editing, although he does try. Oh, and he's my cousin, of course," she finished with a grin.

"Oh, that's cool," I remarked, not entirely sure what Seth had to do with our conversation.

"It is. But do you know what's cooler? Amongst his pre-pubescent friends, he is considered a celebrity. I mean, imagine having two-hundred other people care about the fact that you upload crappy videos enough to let you fill their subscription boxes with whatever mindless drabble pours forth from your lips! That is real power, Olivia, and you can rest assured that Seth abuses it for all it's worth."

I ceased aimlessly staring into the conference center and focused my attention on my bubbly new friend. She amused me.

"Okay, so I guess your cousin is somewhat famous too," I acknowledged, "but Charlie has something like 1.8 _million_ subscribers. That's insane."

Sam shrugged. "It's not all that different. In the grand scheme of things, he's not really that much more famous than my cousin. I'm not saying that Charlie's not awesome; he totally is, but he's only _YouTube_ famous."

I was getting slightly annoyed. "What do you mean 'only YouTube famous'? You can get incredibly famous on YouTube! I mean, take Gangnam Style for instance. Over a billion views! Think about it. There's only like, seven billion people in the entire world. That means that _one-seventh of the population_ _of the world_ has seen that video!"

"Do you really think that a billion _different_ people watched that video? I'd guess it's more like..." she opened the calculator app on her phone and pressed a few buttons, "Fifty-million people watching it twenty times each because they can't get enough of a man making ridiculous facial expressions and preforming pelvic thrusts in an elevator. Which is still a lot of viewers for sure, but, you know, not one-seventh of the population."

"Whatever. They're still famous."

She shrugged again. "I can't speak for Psy, but the YouTubers that I know personally don't seem to think about their 'fame' in quite the same way. Regardless of how awesome it may appear from the outside, they are just regular human beings with just as much anxiety and fear that they're wasting their lives as we are. The difference is that more people care which cereal they eat for breakfast."

I couldn't decide wether or not I liked Sam. It kind of felt like she was blaspheming my favorite YouTube personalities by likening them to such lowly souls as herself and her cousin. On the other hand, the fact that a random stranger was talking to me as though we were best of buds was so strange that I didn't have much time to stress over the fact that I had just made a fool of myself in front of Charlie McDonnell. That was nice.

As we continued to talk, I noticed that people were paying us more and more attention as they walked by. This struck me as odd because, once I had stopped sobbing, it really wasn't all that unusual for two girls to be sitting against a wall and talking to each other in a busy conference center. Still, in the words of my best friend, 'onlookers gonna look on'.

"What's your opinion of fanfiction?" I asked Sam after a bit of silence.

"You mean like for Harry Potter? Because I've read a few good Drarry fics..." she began.

"No, I mean like, you know, with real people. YouTubers, for instance. I think they call it RPF... or something." I tried to make it seem as though the idea was new to me, rather than my ultimate favorite hobby and the source of my many internal ethical debates.

She laughed, "It's okay, I don't judge! Well, I used to think differently about it. When I first found out about it, I considered it to be an invasion of their privacy, you know, like on the same level as slander. It was kind of disgusting to think that people would make up these stories about real people. I mean, they are living, breathing souls! And not only that, but in those stories, they would change the person's sexual orientation or give them eating disorders or make them self-harm or have them get raped or beat up or mugged... like, seriously, fanfics can be so depressing! Until romance steps in to save the day, that is."

"So, I take it you're not a fan of RPF?" I asked.

"Like I said, my opinion has changed over time."

"Why?"

She shrugged, "Somebody wrote a fic about... me."

I looked at her closer. "Wait, you're famous enough to have fanfiction written about you?"

"My subscribers are a bit odd. But that's not the point. The point is, the 'Sam' in this fifteen year old girl's story was a suicidal, anorexic, self-harmer. The story was beautifully written, and actually made me cry a few times, although I'm probably a bit biased. But then I read the author's bio... and that's when I realized that it really wasn't about me."

Sam sighed and gazed back out into the room as she went on. "In her fic, I am rescued by none other than the smoking hot Michael Aranda, who helps me to see that life is still worth living and that I don't have to be perfect to be happy, and yada, yada, yada. Oh, and then we have sex, but I sort of skimmed over those parts because, be honest, could you read your own smut scenes?"

I shuddered.

"Yeah, you see what I mean," Sam chuckled. "But when I read that story, it dawned on me that she wasn't trying to portray me as having all those issues; she was trying to portray all those issues, and using me as her voice to do so. It was like, she carried all those burdens by herself, but decided to ask me to hold them for a while instead. By putting them on me, she could distance herself from her own reality far enough to see some solutions. It wasn't just RPF; it was a freaking therapy session!"

I frowned, "So you think that every deep dark secret that surfaces in a fanfic is really just the author crying out for help? Because I don't think-"

"No, not every one," she quickly clarified. "But many of them. I think the most common theme in fanfics, besides the smut of course, is the idea of a character thinking that no one cares about them, and then discovering that someone really does care. That's a powerful story, Olivia."

I nodded, thinking about what Sam said. Was that accurate? I thought back through my own stories.

After a few more minutes of chatting, Sam stood up and offered me a hand. I took it and rose to my feet next to her.

"Well Olivia," she addressed me, "I really need to get going; I'm supposed to do some panel this afternoon, or whatever. Anyway, it was awesome meeting you and I'd love to keep in contact!" She jotted down her email address and YouTube channel name on half of a napkin that she retrieved from her purse. I wrote my information on the other half.

"By the way," she said glancing at my username, "you've just gained yourself a new subscriber."

"Ditto," I replied with a grin, "and thanks for... you know... caring."

Then, we exchanged napkin pieces, hugged, and parted ways.

I had walked about twenty feet away before I heard the shrieking voices. I turned around, expecting to see Dan Howell or some equally famous British YouTuber, but was surprised to see that the crowd was closing in on none other than Sam.

"What's going on?" I asked a very excited girl next to me. "Who is that girl?"

"Oh my God, you're joking, right?" the girl exclaimed, "Samantha Miller! She's like, one of the top subscribed females on YouTube! She's fricken hilarious! Oh man, I want to meet her so bad! I liked her before she was popular you know." And with that, she thrust herself into the gathering swarm.

I looked back at the crowd and caught Sam's eye. She flashed her smile again and winked at me. _Maybe she was right after all_, I thought. _Maybe these YouTubers really are just people too._


End file.
